Written by William Shakespeare

Directed by Joseph Giani

At the Quincy House Cage through next weekend

YESTERDAY was Shakespeare's 423rd birthday. What better way to celebrate the anniversary of the Bard's birth than to put on a production of his first play, Comedy of Errors?

The Quincy House production is a funny, frolicsome farce in the 16th Century commedia dell' arte tradition. Director Joseph Giani fills the show with characters in brightly colored, Harlequin-style costumes, masks with grotesquely distorted features, troubadours with recorders and guitars, people hitting each other with padded swords, puppets, actors mixing with the audience, and lots of physical, semi-improvisational comedy.

Miraculously, this veritable carnival manages to fit into the confines of the Quincy House Cage, a storage cubicle in the bowels of New Quincy. The actors use the space's claustrophobic confines to their advantage, colliding with each other as the slapstick humor requires.

Shakespeare's story of mistaken identities, chance encounters, amorous intrigue, and multiple acts of violence centers on two sets of identical twins: Antipholus of Syracuse (Nestor Davidson) and Antipholus of Ephesus (Phillip Brittan), who are both prosperous merchants, and their foster brother servants, Dromio of Syracuse (Robinson Everett) and Dromio of Ephesus (Jason Rosencranz).

The pairs have not seen each other since infancy, when a shipwreck separated the Syracusan pair and their father Egeon (Wade Wilcox) from the Ephesian pair. No one realizes that the entire family is now roaming the streets of Ephesus. The twins are constantly mistaken for each other, confusing not only themselves but also the residents of Ephesus.

Since this play is a farce, character development is less important than the machinations of the plot, and performances that would be workmanlike or routine elsewhere are sufficient here. What these actors lack in characterization, they make up for in physical comedy, not only in the histrionic gesticulations and cartoonish violence, but also in minute details, such as droll facial expressions. Orin Percus, as the sly, playful Duke Solinus, and Everett, as the witty Syracusan Dromio, deserve special mention.

Comedy of Errors isn't exactly highbrow theater, and the Quincy House crew is wise not to treat it as such. But it is a lot of fun, a pleasant and entertaining hour-and-a-half spent with the Bard. Happy Birthday, Bill.